Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled. “But thy words interpret thee as a terror!
Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may die other human souls!
Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all new!
In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold.
There was a sense within her, – too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind, – that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one plant that gave it unity.
After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind is spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike.
Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast – at her, the child of honorable parents – at her, who had once been innocent – as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.
Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent in thinking of it.
The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.
Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are conscious of a social warmth from each other’s presence and contiguity. They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.
You, Sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.
Little Pearl, Hester’s young child, fulminates with unconscious aggression in the wild tantrums that, Hawthorne says, reflect the illicit desire with which she was conceived.
The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil.
The scarlet letter had not done its office.
They had looked love with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered.
Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity.
If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or – and the outward semblance is the same – crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.
Providence, in the person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester’s charge the germ and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties.
It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.
Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy – misery, to be able to quell the mightiest with a breath – misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?
It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.